Adequacy.org is sort of a collaborative publishing site. A group of writers are using the site to publish their articles on a wide range of topics.
I didn't choose scoop because of it's democratic functions, I just knew it was pretty and cleaner than some of the other choices out there, and I knew that nothing out there perfectly fit the model we needed. I was going to have to make some code changes with whatever software I used.
I'm mostly done modifying it now, and am looking to see if any of the changes are appropriate for merging back to scoop. Unfortunately the changes in the code are not as clean as something I'd like to submit back, so once I get a development box I might re-implement the changes in a cleaner fashion, since I have a better idea what I'm doing now. We shall see.
So I said our site worked a bit different. Here's how: Essentially only editors on the site can view the submission queue. We post articles to the queue while they're being worked on to get feedback from other editors. So obviously normal users can not view the queue. Additionally, users who can not view the queue can not see editorial comments, or any topical comments attached to stories while they are still in the queue.
This makes things very nice for us, as we can comment all we want about the articles, then push them to the front page and not have to worry about our editorial discussions being visible to the world because we forgot to delete a comment or something.
Additionally, since we are not using voting, I've hacked something on to the voting system. When an editor views a story for the first time, a "Don't care" vote is cast automatically, so it no longer shows up as New in their pending submissions field. When anyone edits the story and makes a change to it, all the votes are cleared out on the story, so people will be able to see that the story has changed and return to offer their thoughts on the changed sections.
Also, similarly to how editors are notified about pending submissions, they are also shown if there are any new comments on any story in the submission queue. The pending submission table has been modified to show which stories have new editorial comments.
Future changes I have planned are a way to gaurantee that one editor isn't overwriting another editors work by editing the story at the same time. I've already got the basic method planned out, and just need time to implement it.
Anyway, I thought you might be interested in how we were able to use Scoop in a method slightly different than what's originally intended.
Overall I'm very impressed with the code inside Scoop. I found it easy to dive right in to my modifications. In fact, I only installed scoop for the first time a little over a week ago, and now we're basically ready to "go live" once a few dns issues sort themselves out.
Thanks everyone. :)
